Invisible History:
Afghanistan's Untold Story

Tells the story of how Afghanistan brought the United States to this place in time after nearly 60 years of American policy in Eurasia - of its complex multiethnic culture, its deep rooting in mystical Zoroastrian and Sufi traditions and how it has played a pivotal role in the rise and fall of empires.

Invisible History, Afghanistan’s Untold Story provides the sobering facts and details that every American should have known about America’s secret war, but were never told. The Real Story Behind the Propaganda
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Crossing Zero:
The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire

Focuses on the AfPak strategy and the importance of the Durand Line, the border separating Pakistan from Afghanistan but referred to by the military and intelligence community as Zero line. The U.S. fought on the side of extremist-political Islam from Pakistan during the 1980s and against it from Afghanistan since September 11, 2001. It is therefore appropriate to think of the Durand/Zero line as the place where America’s intentions face themselves; the alpha and omega of nearly 60 years of American policy in Eurasia. The Durand line is visible on a map. Zero line is not.(Coming February, 2011) (read more)

In the final days of the Soviet Union, an old witticism about truth (pravda) went something like this: In the United States, they tell you everything, but you know nothing. In the USSR, they tell you nothing, but you know everything.

Who would ever be nostalgic for the old Soviet Union, where truth was what the official government mouthpiece told you it was and everything else was a lie meant to undermine the state? Whoever that might be, he or she would feel at home in the now totally neocon-ized U.S., where the old mainstream media marches in lockstep with a dysfunctional federal bureaucracy to aggressively limit freedom of speech and label anything that contradicts its ideological view of reality as enemy propaganda.

From 1918 until its demise in 1991, Pravda was the official newspaper of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. But most Americans would be surprised to learn that The New York Times has been operating for decades as the U.S. government’s Pravda without anyone being the wiser.

Now the truth-war rages between such old mainstream media outlets as The New York Times and any news operation or website that challenges its version of the truth.

We were drawn into this battle by a recent New York Times obituary for our dearest Afghan friend, Sima Wali, who fled the violent Marxist coup in 1978 that kicked off the U.S.-backed rise of Islamic extremism and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.Considering that the Times maintains that the alternative media is filled with false news and Russian propaganda, we were shocked to find many claims in Sima’s obituary that contained American Cold War propaganda about Afghanistan that has long since been debunked. One particularly outrageous example was the claim that in 1978, “gender apartheid” was “imposed by the Communists and then by the Taliban.”

Apparently, The New York Times believes it can turn day to night by blaming communists for introducing gender apartheid, a term adapted (from the South African apartheid regime) in 1996 to draw the public’s attention to the cruelty and human rights abuses imposed by the Taliban on the women of Afghanistan. The communists did not impose it after their takeover in 1978. In fact, the opposite was true. As Sima stated in the introduction to our book, “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” “The draconian Taliban rule stripped women of their basic human rights. Their edicts against women in Afghanistan led to an introduction of a new form of violence termed ‘gender apartheid.’ ” In reality, a major cause for the growth of the resistance to the communists in the more tradition-bound countryside was the forced education of women and girls and the forced removal of the veil. Nor is it understood in the West that many Afghan rulers in the past attempted these reforms with some level of success.

As David B. Edwards writes in his book, “Before Taliban,” there is a direct line between these and other reforms to the reforms mandated by King Amanullah after 1919. He writes, “The transformations that he [Amanullah] sought to bring about before his overthrow in 1929 were in many respects forerunners of those of the Marxists and were particularly revealing of the problems they later encountered.”

An accurate picture of what was done by the communists during their rule in the early 1980s can be read in Jonathan Steele’s 2003 Guardian article, titled “Red Kabul revisited,” in which he compares the U.S. occupation of Kabul in 2003 with Soviet-occupied Kabul of the 1980s:

“In 1981, Kabul’s two campuses thronged with women students, as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras and music centres. The Russians did nothing to stop this vibrant private enterprise.”

Prior to 9/11, Laili Helms, a spokeswoman for and defender of the Taliban and niece to former CIA Director Richard Helms, went so far as to suggest that educating women was a communist plot, claiming that any Afghan woman who could read had to be a communist, because only the communists had educated women. After the American invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, Wali was outraged by this Taliban mentality, which she saw creeping into the American-installed Afghan leadership with the blessing of the American government. In an address to the Global Citizens Circle in Boston in 2003, she stated her objections: “[A]s an Afghan and an American, I will testify to you that the argument against women’s rights is neither Afghan nor Islamic!”

Thirty-four years ago in May, I stood before the irate Afghan press officer for the communist government in Kabul as he threw a copy of The New York Times onto his desk. “Have you read this?” he demanded, pointing to an article by Leslie Gelb, titled “U.S. Said to Increase Arms Aid For Afghan Rebels.” What Gelb, the former Jimmy Carter administration’s assistant secretary of state, had disclosed had angered the Foreign Ministry’s press secretary, Roshan Rowan, and he was holding me, an American, responsible. “Why are you doing this to us?” he shouted. “What is it we have done to you, to deserve this invasion?”

I didn’t need to rely on The New York Times to tell me what was going on in Afghanistan. As the first American journalist to risk the wrath of the Ronald Reagan administration, with its newly installed neoconservative foreign policy, by bringing a news crew to Kabul in 1981, I was one of only a handful of Americans who knew the score. The United States was backing Muslim guerrillas who were burning down schools specifically for girls and killing local officials, whether they were communist or not. The Gelb article made clear that in collaboration with the Saudis, Egyptians, Chinese, Iranians and Pakistanis, the “bleeders” inside the Reagan administration were upping the ante in order to “draw more and more Soviet troops into Afghanistan,” while at the same time claiming to pursue “a negotiated settlement to the war.” It was not obvious from the Gelb article how the United States could be escalating a conflict while negotiating a settlement at the same time in Afghanistan in 1983. Also missing from the article was any indication that the administration’s policy was a fundamental contradiction.

In the spring of 1983, we had invited Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, to return with us to Kabul to unwrap the riddle of why the United Nations negotiations were getting nowhere. Contracted to ABC’s “Nightline,” Fisher met with the Kremlin’s chief Afghan specialist, who had flown down from Moscow and told him point blank, “We want to get out. Give us six months to save face, and we’ll leave the Afghans to solve their own problems.” Upon his return, Fisher expected his discovery would be greeted with relief. Instead he found that “negotiated settlement” was only a fig leaf for escalating the war. The mainstream media were just beginning to ramp up a propaganda campaign, which would become known as Charlie Wilson’s War, to drive support for keeping the Soviets pinned down in their own Vietnam while bleeding Sima Wali’s Afghanistan to death.

The American people expect the full story from their “free press,” and the Constitution demands that the press serve the people and not the bureaucracy. The New York Times needs to get its mission straight, lest it sacrifice its credibility to the very thing it claims to stand against. Left-wing Afghan communists cannot be magically transformed into right-wing Pakistani Taliban. The United States is not the Soviet Union, and The New York Times should stop behaving as if it is Pravda.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who’d sacrificed Sima Wali’s Afghanistan to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam, passed on four months earlier in the same city where Sima lived until her death. If they should meet in the afterlife, one can easily imagine how delightfully uncomfortable that encounter would be for Zbig!

Sima Wali, the first Afghan refugee to come to this country in 1978 has died at her home in Falls Church, Virginia. To the many Afghans and Americans who knew her, Sima Wali was the soul of Afghanistan, a woman who dedicated her life to helping not just her country of birth, but refugee women and the men who support them, from around an increasingly desperate and dangerous world. You probably never heard of Sima Wali because she was not the kind of Afghan woman the mainstream media and their establishment backers wanted you to know about. As a member of Afghanistan’s ruling family, Sima represented many generations of Afghan leadership dedicated to bringing their country into the modern world after centuries of crushing colonialism from both the east and the west.

Sima was uniquely adept at that task, a cultured woman whose intelligence, grace and beauty charmed all who met her including the world’s leaders. From the time she arrived in the United States until illness consumed her, she worked tirelessly for human rights and the rights of women through her organization Refugee Women in Development (RefWid). Her work impacted the U.S. Congress, the State Department, and the United Nations. It led to numerous awards and to her selection as one of only three women to be chosen as delegates to the U.N.-organized Bonn Agreement, which created a new Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Because of Sima, that government mandated the creation of a Ministry of Women’s Affairs.

Sima’s death constitutes an immense tragedy not just for her friends and family but for Afghanistan and especially for her adopted country, the United States. The fate of America and Afghanistan has been intimately linked since the 1970s when the Carter administration’s Zbigniew Brzezinski began a covert mission to undermine Afghanistan’s government long before the Soviet invasion. Sima was one of the earliest victims of that destabilization when Marxists claimed power in a bloody April 1978 coup and she was forced to flee. As a refugee woman and naturalized American, no one embodied the commitment, the dedication and the determination to overcome the catastrophic consequences of that relationship more than her.

In 1998 when we first met in New York City she was nearly despondent. Despite her over two decades of work, the Clinton administration saw little problem with the draconian military advances made by the Taliban from their bases in Pakistan. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in fact, was said to believe that the Taliban represented a cleansing antidote to the corrupted and feuding warlords empowered by the U.S. in their 1980s war against the Soviets.

That same year, 1998, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted to an interviewer from the French Nouvel Observateur that the consequences of the CIA’s secret operation that destroyed Sima’s country were far from bad. In fact the destruction of Afghanistan was never a concern at all. “That secret operation was an excellent idea.” He said. “It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”

Brzezinski dismissed concern about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, or having armed future terrorists by saying: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” And Brzezinski even went so far as to admit that the U.S. had not only lied about its support for the rebels before the Soviet invasion but that he’d told Carter the action would probably guarantee that the Soviets would invade.

We were fortunate enough to return with Sima to Afghanistan in 2002 in a remarkable journey where we witnessed first-hand her commitment to the Afghan people. Filming Sima’s workwith the women and men who had risked their lives to secretly educate and train women during the Taliban era – with no budget other than their meager earnings – was beyond humbling. That October trip held a moment of promise and hope even amidst the ruins. One of the Cold War’s ugliest chapters had finally come to an end. The Taliban had been sent back to Pakistan where they came from and a ravaged Afghanistan could be set back on a course to peace and prosperity.

But the future of Afghanistan was clouded by the expansion of American empire into Central Asia and the not so secret agendas of America’s supposed allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. From her many years on the public stage, Sima knew that she represented an obstacle to powerful forces that wanted to rewrite Afghanistan’s history and deny its long progress toward democracy. Her very existence threatened the warlords, drug dealers and human traffickers that thrived in an economy destroyed by 25 years of constant war. But most of all she threatened those who wanted the past forgotten; those that believed Afghanistan should never resume its drive for independence as a secular state, and that equal rights for women and the country’s ethnic minorities were a dangerous dream. And for that she will be remembered by us, the most.

Since America’s most recent war in Afghanistan began in 2001, Americans have been fed a steady diet of misinformation and outright falsehoods. These falsehoods range from claims that the Afghan nation was never really a nation at all; to proclamations that Afghanistan was always ruled by warlords and that it is dangerously naïve to think otherwise. Those who knew Afghanistan prior to America’s longest war, understand that these assumptions are wrong and are at best self-serving delusions. It was the United States who backed Afghanistan’s corrupt warlords against the country’s ruling dynasty as early as 1973 and it was the United States that put them back into power following its invasion in 2001. Yet these falsehoods form the basis of a Hollywood fiction that continues to hobble America’s failing effort there.

Over the years there have been glimmers of hope that a new awareness of Afghanistan’s true history was finally emerging from the darkness. An October 2009 article in the New York Times by Elisabeth Bumiller, titled REMBERING AFGHANISTAN’S GOLDEN AGE, stated: “American and Afghan scholars and diplomats say it is worth recalling four decades in the country’s recent history, from the 1930s to the 1970s, when there was a semblance of a national government and Kabul was known as “the Paris of Central Asia.” Bumiller goes on to write that “Afghans and Americans alike describe the country in those days as a poor nation, but one that built national roads, stood up an army and defended its borders.”

In a separate 2009 article in Foreign Policy Magazine titled A CASE FOR HUMILITY IN AFGHANISTAN, author Steve Coll writes: “In my view, most current American commentary underestimates the potential for transformational change in South Asia over the next decade or two, spurred by economic progress and integration” Between the late 18thcentury and World War I, Afghanistan was a troubled but coherent and often independent state. Although very poor, after the 1920s it enjoyed a long period of continuous peace with its neighbors, secured by a multi-ethnic Afghan National Army and unified by a national culture.”

In addition, prior to 1978, when Sima first became a refugee, Afghanistan was self-sufficient in food production and had no refugee problem. An even closer look reveals the origins of the modern Afghan state dating back to the 16th century and the rise of the Roshaniya movement. Led by Sufi poet Bayazid Ansarithe movement is indicative of the broadly progressive nature of Afghan Islam. Ansari’s goal was said to be the achievement of equality between men and women. In his landmark 1969 book The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan – the Carnegie Corporation’sVartan Gregorian states: “Ansari’s aim, among other things was to establish a national religion, the movement encouraged the Afghans in the tribal belt to struggle against Moghul rule. The Roshaniya movement thus promoted the first political formulation of the concept of Afghan nationality.”

Prior to British military invasions of the mid-19th century, Afghans were not even hostile to European Imperialists. East India Company political officer Alexander Burnes wrote home in May of 1832, “The people of this country are kind hearted and hospitable. They have no prejudice against a Christian and none against our nation.” Concerned over Russian competition, Burnes argued that a strong Afghan leader could hold the country together and resist foreign encroachment, but a country split into feudal principalities and tribes would invite intrigue and cause chaos. Yet the good will of the Afghan people was lost in 1839 when the British government willfully acquiesced to sending an army into Kabul and suffered what was at the time, the greatest military defeat in British history.

Afghanistan’s late 19th century Amir Abdur Rahman Khan began his rule determined to establish a modern nation-state. By 1901 he had created a national army and a government bureaucracy that paved the way for a small but well educated middle-class. In 1919, Abdur Rahman’s grandson Amanullah brought on a period of rapid modernization and democratic change that would be the envy of any nation-builder today. Amanullah declared Afghanistan’s independence from Britain, drew up its first constitution in 1923, guaranteed universal suffrage and civil rights to all of Afghanistan’s minorities, prohibited revenge killings and abolished subsidies for tribal chieftains as well as the royal family.

Overthrown in 1929 with the help of the British, Amanullah’s embrace of modernism, equality and democracy is often viewed as the cause of his political downfall. Yet, as Vartan Gregorian and others have observed, Amanullah’s political undoing stemmed mostly from his inability to support his social reforms with solid economic measures, not from any underlying rejection of his educational and political programs. The same could be said of King Zahir Shah’s “experiment in democracy,” from 1963 to 1973, where failure stemmed from a weak economy and the emerging storm of external Cold War political forces that were already tearing at the fabric of Afghanistan’s political structure.

Sima Wali believed that of any force on earth the United States would understand and help to restore the hard fought victories over feudalism and backwardness that had been won for Afghanistan following British colonial rule. But as time went on she came to learn that those beliefs would never be fulfilled. She would laugh off the dangers of working in Afghanistan’s distant provinces. She would say she was the canary in the Afghan mineshaft and that as long as she was still breathing the voiceless Afghan people would have a voice in the struggle to restore what had been lost. But without the support she had been promised she stood alone. During her last trip to Afghanistan in 2005, she was targeted by the Taliban and narrowly escaped a violent militant attack. She returned home with unusual symptoms and a new enemy slowly gained ground.

The parallel struggles that Sima waged to restore her homeland for her people and her personal struggle to regain her heath are now over. Her open rejection of “misplaced charity”; and anguished cries for “sensible long-term strategies to rebuild the Afghan nation” have gone unheard. As far back as 2003 she stated clearly at a Global Citizens Circle presentation in Boston that she had deep concerns for events that were developing in Afghanistan. “Although some gains have been achieved in removing a repressive regime, women remain at risk and I remain highly concerned about the Taliban mentality in ruling circles. And as an Afghan and an American I will testify to you that the argument against women’s rights is neither Afghan nor Islamic!”

In a stroke of irony, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who’d sacrificed Sima’s Afghanistan to give the hated Soviet Union its own Vietnam had also passed on just four months earlier and in Falls Church, Virginia, the same city where Sima had lived until her death.

A year before, the architect of America’s use of Imperial power to attain global dominance had made a startling about face in an article titled “Towards a Global Realignment” warning that “the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.”

As Sima Wali discovered many years before, had Zbigniew Brzezinski used his powerful influence on American policy makers to aid Afghanistan in its struggles for democracy back in the 1970s instead of using it as the bait to lure the Soviets into invading, the world would be in a very different place.

For over a decade Sima fought with all her strength, but though her voice has now been silenced, her deeds and her words will live on to inspire new generations of Afghans and Americans to create the genuine democracy they have been denied for so long.

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould. The US and the UK have a lengthy history of using propaganda to hide their true agendas. Now, the Machiavellian elites are consolidating their takeover of America and are transforming the world into Dante’s vision of Hell.

Democracy and freedom of expression are under attack. There is blood in the streets. How did it get that way? Where did it come from, what are its sources and what continues to drive it? This four part series will look at the origin of those sources and unlock connections that when understood should open doors of perception that have been locked shut for far too long.

Tricksters (the mythological origin of all clowns) have embraced life’s paradoxes by creating coherence through confusion and disorder to get to the truth. Neocons use Trickster tactics that never lead to coherence.
(Image by Procrustes4u)PermissionDetailsDMCA

In keeping with the goal of providing intelligence, propaganda and operational support for what London believed was sure to be a coming war against Moscow, in 1946 the British and Commonwealth Foreign Office revived its anti-Nazi “Black Propaganda organization” the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). Renamed the Information Research Department (IRD) and funded by the CIA, the IRD would operate from 1946 until 1977 as a covert anti-Communist propaganda unit producing, distributing and circulating unattributable propaganda. According to Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, “the vast IRD enterprise had one sole aim: To spread its ceaseless propaganda output (i.e. a mixture of outright lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists who worked for major agencies and magazines, including Reuters and the BBC, as well as every other available channel. It worked abroad to discredit communist parties in Western Europe which might gain a share of power by entirely democratic means, and at home to discredit the British Left”.

IRD was to become a self-fulfilling disinformation machine for the far-right-wing of the international intelligence elite and together with the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) set out to establish a new brand of Western ideology that would delegitimize not just Communism but the very idea of the “Left” itself. The jumping off spot was the 1950 Berlin conference. The Congress for Cultural Freedom’s fourteen-point “Freedom Manifesto” was to identify the West with freedom but the right-wing rhetoric emanating from the podium chilled even MI6’s own A.J. ‘Freddie’ Ayer, Professor of Philosophy at University College, London, and Oxford historian Hugh Trevor Roper. Stephen Dorril writes “What irritated Ayer and Trevor-Roper was the ‘hysterical atmosphere in which the Congress was held, orchestrated as it was by revengeful ex-Communists’… Supporting the idea of ‘tolerance’, they were repelled by the delirious applause that greeted speeches calling for war against the Soviet Union.”

According to Frances Stoner Saunders, author of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World of Arts and Letters “Hugh Trevor-Roper was appalled by the provocative tone… ‘There was a speech by Franz Borkenauwhich was very violent and indeed almost hysterical. He spoke in German and I regret to say that as I listened and I heard the baying voices of approval from the huge audiences, I felt, well, these are the same people who seven years ago were probably baying in the same way to similar German denunciations of Communism coming from Dr. Goebbels in the Sports Palast. And I felt, well, what sort of people are we identifying with? That was the greatest shock to me. There was a moment during the Congress when I felt that we were being invited to summon up Beelzebub in order to defeat Stalin.’”

Warnings by both Trevor-Roper and Ayer would go unheeded and the CCF would go on to co-opt generations of Europeans and Americans with a covert totalitarian cultural narrative that most would be deceived into believing was a product of the West’s genuine free expression.

Working alongside Beelzebub in the late 1940s and early 1950s were a number of old familiar faces from the far right wing of European politics bent on reviving a form of Austro-Hungarian Empire including its heir apparent Archduke Otto von Habsburg and the (PEU) Pan European Union’s President for life, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi. In 1949 Habsburg founded the hard right wing Centre for European Documentation and Information (CEDI) with the intention of breaking the political isolation of Franco’s fascist Spain. In 1948 a rival group to PEU known as the European Movement, the EM was established with CIA assistance to work toward the creation and integration of a United Europe along strictly anti-communist lines.

With the help and guidance of the CIA on September 25th1952, a high level undercover organization of powerbrokers known as the Bilderberg Group which included Netherlands Prince Bernhard, French Prime Minister Antoine Pinay, Italian Prime Minister Alcide de Gaspari, American banker and globalist George Ball and CIA Director General Walter Bedell Smith, quietly came into existence. Numerous questions have arisen about the true purpose of the Bilderberg Group, its role as the world’s most influential forum, its aristocratic bent and its supposed One World Government agenda. Antoine Pinay had been part of Vichy France’s collaborationist government; banker George Ball believed the nation state itself had already become obsolete and the world better off run by as an East India Company-style corporation; Prince Bernhard profited from his various Nazi affiliations, before during and after the war. But none of this controversy was enough to halt its ongoing meetings and it continues to be the place where the elite’s elite gather once each year to manage their ongoing takeover of the planet. But while media attention focuses on Bilderberg, little to no attention has ever been focused on an even more select group organized within it that may have played the deciding role in connecting Europe’s pre-World War II fascist movements to today’s drumbeat for war with Russia.

The Pinay Cercle and its Fascist Roots

That a small elite circle of European aristocrats, bankers, politicians and top military/intelligence officials should have secretly met after World War II to plot the future of the world should come as no surprise at this late date. The United States has no less than 17 intelligence agencies that operate in secret and those are just the ones we know about. The American public has no awareness of what these agencies do and the unseen power they represent as an unelected second government. That an elite Bilderberger like David Rockefeller should claim he did not learn about this elite circle’s existence until 1967 and then express shock by its “ultra-right wing” makeup should be a wakeup call to all Americans that things are not what they appear to be. Rockefeller writes in his memoirs:

“Bilderberg overlapped for a time with my membership in a relatively obscure but potentially even more controversial body known as the Presenti group. I had first learned about it in October 1967 when Carlo Presenti , the owner of a number of important Italian corporations, took me aside at a Chase investment forum in Paris and invited me to join… It was a select group, he told me, mostly Europeans… Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, and Konrad Adenauer were founding members” Antoine Pinay, a former French President; Giulio Andreotti, several times prime minister of Italy”Otto von Habsburg claimant to all lands of the Austro-Hungarian empire” and Jean-Paul Leon Violet, a conservative French intellectuel.”

Rockefeller goes on to recount how Presenti’s small group, actually known as the Pinay Circle or just Le Cercle, met three times a year and was occasionally joined by Henry Kissinger when meeting in Washington. “Maître Violet, who had close connections with Deuxième Bureau of the Service des Renseignements (the French CIA), provided lengthy background briefings. Using an overhead projector, Violet displayed transparency after transparency filled with data [supposedly] documenting Soviet infiltration of governments and supporting his belief that the threat of global Communist victory was quite real.”

Rockefeller found the discussion group fascinating but also found their overtly Fascist politics and paranoid talk of a growing “Red Menace” to be highly unbelievable. After being alerted by his fellow associates at Chase that his membership in this high level group “could be construed as ‘consorting with reactionaries,’” he withdrew. But with the war in Vietnam showing no sign of progress and with the January 1968 Tet offensive about to demonstrate the Pentagon’s hopeless incompetence, the old Fascist network of pre-World War II anti-Soviet alliances was about to make a very big comeback.

Key to that comeback was one time Le Cercle chairman and British agent-provocateur Brian Rossiter Crozierand his prote’ge’ Robert Moss. At the request of the CIA and MI6, Crozier had taken over the CIA’s propaganda outfit Forum World Features (FWF) in 1965 and by 1966 had privatized it to maintain its cover as a one of the CIA’s most prolific and successful propaganda outlets. Despite being exposed in Ramparts Magazine in March 1967, FWF would continue on for 8 years during which Crozier would spawn a second CIA/MI6 venture known as the Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) in 1970. With the power of an officially sanctioned Institute behind him, Crozier would now do more than just fabricate and distort news; he would now be able to create unsubstantiated “proof” of the Cercle’s right-wing claims of Soviet penetration and infiltration. And when approached by the Cercle’s Carlo Presenti to “study” the problem of de’tente, Crozier would begin a decade of preparation for realizing a long sought goal of Europe’s pre-World War II Fascist elite; the rollback of Soviet power and the delegitimization of socialist, nationalist and even moderate Western democratic regimes, including the United States.

The Institute for the Study of Conflict would not just issue reports to the West’s elites supporting the Cercle’s “Red Menace” fantasies. ISC and its Washington based sister organization WISC, would create the necessary false perceptions to justify action. Throughout the 1970s and 80s Crozier’s right-wing Red Menace propaganda would completely win over the West’s politicized intelligence services. Totally convinced by their own propaganda that the Soviets were a growing menace, they would completely miss the ongoing dissolution of the Soviet Union and in the end be taken by complete surprise upon its collapse in 1991.

Please join us again in September for the conclusion to our multipart series when we resume with the final installments detailing how events created by national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Carter administration, opened the door for a globalist/syndicalist takeover under the cover of American Empire — a takeover in the works since the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918.

Democracy and freedom of expression are under attack. There is blood in the streets. How did it get that way? Where did it come from, what are its sources and what continues to drive it? This four part series will look at the origin of those sources and unlock connections that when understood should open doors of perception that have been locked shut for far too long.

Speaking at The Intervention in Afghanistan and the Fall of De’tente Conference at Lysebu Norway, 1995, former Carter National Security staff council member Dr. Gary Sick, (1976-1981) described the criteria for driving American war planners into action.

“It seems to me there is a difference here between facts and perceptions, and this seems to be where the problem ultimately lies. Of course, perception is reality, as far as policy makers are concerned, so what you believe, in fact, drives what you do regardless of what the facts are.”

It’s vital to remember Dr. Gary Sick’s observation at this moment in our latest deep-state-anti-Russia identity crisis. After 16 years of war accompanied by political and financial crises America finds itself in a war of perception with the world and with itself. If America’s policy-makers continue to think they can create reality regardless of facts, then whatever today’s policy makers choose to see as real they will try to make real. It’s a simple formula for delusional thinking with a history of terrible consequences.

In the 1950s some of America’s more creative defense intellectuals perceived Vietnam to be the linchpin of what they called the Domino Theory of a global communist expansion all the while ignoring the nationalist motivations of the North Vietnamese. That misperception, intentional or not led to one of the greatest military blunders in history as well as devastating consequences for the community of defense intellectuals that had thought it up.

As described by author Fred Kaplan, “Vietnam brought out the dark side of nearly everyone inside America’s national security machine. And it exposed something seamy and disturbing about the very enterprise of the defense intellectuals. It revealed that the concept of force underlying all their formulations and scenarios was an abstraction, practically useless as a guide to action.”

Vietnam revealed a conceptual failure in an esoteric system of analysis created by an inbred group of defense intellectuals that was supposed to determine what was real and what was imagined. By1968 its failure had broken the eastern establishment’s hold over foreign policy and created the need to open de’tente with the Soviet Union. But for those on the right who had fought to roll back the very existence of the Soviet Union since its inception in 1917, de’tente was not an option and would be fought by a sophisticated Cold War propaganda machine that would outdo Nazi Germany.

Origins of a Plot

The popular perception that the United States and the Soviet Union were allies against Fascism during World War II disguises the fact that Wall Street’s financial elites were not so secretly supporting the rearmament of Germany after World War I and were especially active in backing Adolph Hitler and the growth of the Nazi Wehrmacht prior to and throughout the war years.

According to Anthony C. Sutton in his 1976 book, Wall Street and the Rise Of Hitler , “The build-up for European war both before and after 1933 was in great part due to Wall Street financial assistance in the 1920s to create a German cartel system, and to technical assistance from well-known American firms— to build the German Wehrmacht… In brief, American companies associated with the Morgan-Rockefeller international investment bankers— were intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry— those firms controlled through the handful of financial houses, the Federal Reserve Bank system, the Bank for International Settlements, and their continuing international cooperative arrangements and cartels which attempt to control the course of world politics and economics.”

A World War II study on Nazi occupied France published in 1947 by Harvard University’s William L. Langer, Chief of the Research and Analysis branch of the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, from 1942 to 1945 revealed the origins of a prewar Fascist-plot that may have paved the way for France’s early capitulation in the war. Langer’s report detailed in his book Our Vichy Gamble makes clear that the prewar ideological and nationalist lines between fascist Germany and France were never at issue when it came to Europe’s big business interests. On the contrary; if successful, the plot’s French backers stood to benefit immensely from a German-ruled Europe. Langer writes:

“Germany could count on more than enough eager supporters among French industrial and banking interests–in short, among those who even before the war had turned to Nazi Germany and had looked to Hitler as the savior of Europe from Communism— These people were as good fascists as any in Europe” Many of them had long had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of ’synarchy,’ which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists.”

The brotherhood of synarchists was not the only hard right wing European group dreaming of a pan-European Union along fascist lines. In London in the mid-1930s, an alliance of militant e’migre’ groups from 16 Central European countries formed a secret international Catholic organization headed by a former Tsarist general. Known at the time as Intermarium (and again today)for that part of Europe bordered by the Adriatic, the Baltic, Black, Aegean and Ionian seas its secret mission was to form an anti-Communist cordon sanitaire against Russia. Stephen Dorril, author of MI6: Fifty Years of Operations writes “The dream of a postwar [World War I] Pan-Danubian [Con]Federation from the Baltic to the Aegean under Habsburg rule — a sort of recreation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire — was kept alive under the direction of the pretender to the throne Archduke Otto von Habsburg. The Monarchists had had the enthusiastic support of Winston Churchill, who, like many of its adherents, had been a member of the Brussels-based right-wing Pan European Union (PEU), founded in 1922 by Hapsburg and Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi as ‘the only way of guarding against an eventual world hegemony by Russia’.”

Another, even more militant group was the Promethean League of the Nationssubjugated by Moscow (soon to be shortened to the Promethean League) which focused mainly on liberating the non-Russian ethnicities in Ukraine and Georgia. The end of World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had left Poland in charge of Western Ukraine which, according to author Dorril’s sources, sparked Polish ambitions to launch an anti-communist counter revolution inside Russia and capture its own empire. “The League ‘played a large part in Polish aspirations for the development of a bloc of states in Eastern Europe, stretching from Finland to the Caucasus, in which Poland could become a true great power by exercising her ‘natural’ position of leadership.’”

Despite Poland’s “‘natural’ position of leadership,” her occupation of Western Ukraine came up against the fiercely racist Galician separatists of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). OUN viewed their own racial beliefs as more in league with Germany’s National Socialists (Nazis) than anything Poland had to offer or even Europe’s more doctrinaire Fascists and Nazi money soon came pouring in. The OUN rejected the Promethean League outright and struck out at Poland’s leadership role. In 1934 OUN’s leaders, Stefan Bandera, Yarolsav Stetsko and Mykola Lebed were arrested by Polish authorities for the murder of the Polish Interior minister and sentenced to death only to later have their sentences reduced to life in prison. But while the League of Nations branded the OUN a “terrorist syndicate” British Intelligence’s head of station in Finland, MI6’s Harry Carr, recruited Bandera’s followers. From the mid-1930s onward MI6 joined in funding the Galician OEN’s anti-Soviet terror operations together with Germany’s military intelligence unit, the Abwehr. The OUN-B (B for Bandera) would go on to establish their reputation for cruelty as Waffen SS extermination squads during operation Barbarossa.

Whether Carr was aware of the Nazi support for OUN or perhaps even coordinated with them is still an open question, but as of 1934 British and German sympathies for Eastern Europe’s terrorists were clearly on the same page when it came to Russia and it didn’t end with a random and isolated MI6 station chief.

As with their French associates, influential right wing networks within Britain’s intelligence services found common cause with Eastern Europe’s fascist anti-communist resistance movements even after the Soviets became Britain’s ally in 1941. One group within the rightwing of the Conservative Party, the Imperial Policy Group (IPG) which maintained strong ties to the head of the Polish government-in-exile, General Wladyslaw Sikorski, was even known to favor a Nazi victory to that of the Soviet Union. Authoritarian but not outwardly Fascist prior to the war, Intermarium immediately joined up with Nazi intelligence following German occupation and remained so throughout the war. By the end of 1944, MI6 was actively recruiting known collaborators and fascists amongst all the exile organizations and as Soviet troops moved from the east, they would be activated to provide intelligence, propaganda and operational support for what London was certain was a coming war against Moscow.

Join us for Part 4 as we explore the post-World War II merger of anti-Soviet covert forces and the emergence of an elite intelligence operation known as the Cercle, which would secretly begin the process of shifting the West’s political dialogue away from the center and toward their extreme Fascist right-wing views.

Please join us in September for the conclusion to our series when we resume with the final installments detailing how events created by national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski during the Carter administration, opened the door for a globalist/syndicalist takeover under the cover of American Empire – a takeover in the works since the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918.

Democracy and freedom of expression are under attack. There is blood in the streets. How did it get that way? Where did it come from, what are its sources and what continues to drive it? This four-part series will look at the origin of those sources and unlock connections that when understood should open doors of perception that have been locked shut for far too long.

“Tensions between Russia and the U.S. are again on the rise and the risk of a trans-Atlantic trade war is greater than ever, which would have devastating consequences for the global economy. The West as an entity, it would seem, is disintegrating.”

On the eve of the 2017 G-20 summit in Hamburg the view of the United States from Germany is grim. Europe is overrun with refugees from NATO’s wars in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa while President Trump makes impossible demands and offers nothing in return. In a scene reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, angry masses riot in the streets of Hamburg protesting austerity and economic inequality. Like 18th-century French Royals, the European Union’s detached and disaffected ruling elites struggle to deal with events beyond their control. The lessons of the past go unlearned, the classic mistakes of the ages repeated. The EU, a post-World War II project of the CIA, is broken. America’s role as a unipower has ended in bitterness and without ceremony. The post-war world order held together for better or worse by the perception of American omnipotence and the ideology of casino capitalism is disintegrating fast and with it “The West as an entity.”

Decline of the West

The end did not come suddenly. As disappointing as it may be to the fulminating anti-Trump political sphere, the “culture” of Western civilization has been in a state of confusion over its decline for some time. It is only befitting a cosmic joke that an American hotel/casino owner should bring down the curtain on it.

One hundred years ago in the run-up to World War I, the visionary historian/philosopher Oswald Spengler produced a radical analysis of civilization and culture entitled The Decline of the West, Form and Actuality. Written before the war, but published in 1918 in the aftermath of German defeat, the book became an immediate success and has for nearly one hundred years been challenging successive generations of geopoliticians to come to terms with it.

In Decline of the West, Spengler defines “cultures” as an organic whole that evolves through a life cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter and then fades away. The final and death phase of this cultural evolution Spengler defines as “civilization” itself or the rule of the rational where only “the brain rules because the soul has abdicated.” As demonstrated throughout history, civilizations come and go and by World War I, Europe had achieved the high point in this cyclical experience and had no place to go but down.

As an inspiration to the young James Burnham, Spengler divided the existence of all things into a duality of the formal and the real, between the thinkers and the doers, the “sword side” and the “spindle side” which at the end of its endless cycle returns to formlessness. To Spengler and to Burnham the final phase of civilization comes as democracy gives way to what Burnham called the Oligarchy but Spengler referred to as Caesarism. It is a place in which the once-vibrant institutions of civilization have become spiritually dead, money has become valueless, and all the wars are cruel private wars waged by tyrants for the private possession of the world.

Between the Hamburg crowd’s protest under the banner of Welcome to Hell, and Donald Trump’s challenge to the Europeans whether the West had the “will to survive” the time has come for Americans to ask themselves some important questions; what then is this entity called the West that is disintegrating? Could this miserable ending have been avoided? And who and what exactly are responsible for bringing us to these gates of hell?

To Spengler, Western civilization was always a Faustian bargain. “In the poetry of the West, Faustian Man figures, first as Parzeval or Tristan, then (modified always into harmony with the epoch) as Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan and eventually Faust or Werther.” Having already sold his soul to the devil, Western Man has been freed to decide his own fate. From Spengler to James Burnham to Patrick Buchanan the school of 20th-century conservative and neoconservative/fascist thought has blamed the West’s decline on the betrayal of this contract by “soft” liberal values. The Third Reich promised to turn the clock back by crushing the communist heresy and returning Germany to its martial glories of the past. Hitler’s invasion of Russia was named Operation Barbarossa after Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s 12th-century crusade. But instead of a German renewal, Hitler’s scheme to thwart the end only brought it nearer.

The post-Vietnam rise of Ronald Reagan and the new right promised an ideological revival as well, a return to core conservative values and a new morning in America. In practice Reagan’s anti-government policies, his massive and unnecessary defense buildup and reckless trickle-down economics hastened its decline by decades and in the end destroyed the fabric of American society.

As it was in the past and remains now, the right’s use of Machiavellian tactics to turn the tide in its favor almost always works and in the end invariably winds up bringing down the house. The bitter philosophical conflict between idealism (form) and reality and what constitutes a just society goes back to the origin of Western thought and has produced profound political contradictions throughout the centuries. The arch-neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick argued back in 1979 in an essay regarding the emerging new class in American politics, “The goal of the new-class reformer–whether of Left or Right–is to bring the real into conformity with the ideal (that is, with an idea of reality), [which] manifests a broader belief that social institutions can and should conform to and serve abstract principles. The most serious problems with this rationalist approach were recognized by Aristotle, who criticized Plato’s blueprint for the ideal state… Aristotle also argued that experience and law were better guides than reason alone to the good society and that Plato’s proposal would sacrifice real goods to illusory ideals.”

Kirkpatrick’s essay on the dangers of idealism should stand as a textbook study for James Burnham’s Machiavellians. Kirkpatrick would soon become the Reagan administration’s spokeswoman at the UN for the new neoconservative class with its emphasis on “illusory ideals” of a worldwide democratic revolution and service to abstract principles over experience and the law. But, as laid out by James Burnham in his Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, the new Machiavellians must delude the masses with lies and outright fraud if necessary to maintain control.

Kirkpatrick’s “idea of reality” was shaped by a hybrid neoconservative/fascist ideology whose roots lay in the social chaos of the early 20th century; World War I, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Trotskyist schism within Marxist/Leninism. Supported by the Pentagon’s top brass from World War II forward and then brewed together by the CIA with Europe’s leftover fascist elites, Lenin’s followers metastasized from Trotskyist intellectuals into Defense Intellectuals. From the 1970s onward they would become a self-perpetuating force for war inside both Democratic and Republican parties and a fifth column for undermining any thought of normal diplomatic relations with Russia. The Reagan administration provided a platform for this new class of former Trotskyists who were willing to sacrifice anything real or imagined for their illusory ideals. But the ultimate success of their rise to power relied on more than just a Marxist dialectic of infiltration and subversion.

The neoconservative political takeover of the 1970s was made possible by a network of old right-wing European and American interests dedicated to overthrowing Western democracies and replacing them with a new class of fascist transnational elites. These elites, currently referred to as globalists but prior to World War II as Synarchists, have long plotted the overthrow of the nation state and rule by a one-world government. But none of it could have happened without the covert assistance of rogue right-wing factions of the West’s intelligence services and a brutal but sophisticated propaganda campaign backed by the CIA, to control the West’s perceptions of what that world would look like.

Join us for Part 3 as we look at the synarchy of fascist organizations vying for power and influence prior to World War II and their revival and consolidation under an exclusive Cold War circle of corporate power aimed at eliminating the nation state and democracy.

Democracy and freedom of expression are under attack. There is blood in the streets. How did it get that way? Where did it come from, what are its sources and what continues to drive it? In this four part series we’ll look at the origin of those sources and unlock connections that when understood should open doors of perception that have been locked shut for far too long.

As a brief darkness cuts a path across the American continent from the latest total eclipse of the sun, another more lasting darkness is now welling up from the ground of a secret history that to most Americans remains unknown. Recent events continue to demonstrate America is not at peace with itself or the world. It appears the United States is in opposition to just about everyone, everywhere and there is no relief in sight. A November 2008 report titled Known Unknowns: Unconventional “Strategic Shocks” in Defense Strategy Development by the U.S. Army’s Nathan Freier predicted this moment as the United States grappled with civil insurrection and a multi-polar world it was not equipped to handle. “Imagine ‘a new era of containment with the United States as the nation to be contained’ where the principle tools and methods of war involve everything but those associated with traditional military conflict. Imagine that the sources of this ‘new era of containment’ are widespread; predicated on nonmilitary forms of political, economic, and violent action; in the main, sustainable over time; and finally, largely invulnerable to effective reversal through traditional U.S. advantages.”

Our last four part series dealt with the origins of the neocons, their roots in Communist Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International and their emergence as a political force in the neoconservative politics for never-ending war. How many Americans would be happy to learn that the conservative new right revolution of the 1980s was really a rebranding of a Trotskyist anti-Stalinist agenda for worldwide Communist revolution made new and empowered by the CIA? Such was the outgrowth of Cold War psychological warfare that most Americans never learned about and still don’t understand. Unfortunately for most Americans in 2017, events that occurred a hundred years ago or even 50 years ago aren’t just vague remembrances, they’re non-existent. But the “system” of thought “dialectical materialism” employed by Marxist/Leninists is still in use by neoconservatives in both political parties and it has now reduced our democracy and everything else Americans once believed in, to a nascent Fascism.

As recent events in Charlottesville Virginia made clear, class and race hatred arestill the tipping point for social upheaval much the way they were in Europe just prior to World War II. Today’s social dynamics are strikingly similar to that moment in history and likewise the behavior of the participants a mirror image of their 1930s counterparts. A three volume history written by newspaper columnist Waverley Root published in 1945 titled The Secret History of The War tells a tale of the internecine social chaos just before the fall of France in 1940 that could stand verbatim as a warning for what is happening today.

“Below the surface, this is a war to check the spread of democracy. This is easy to see if you examine the circumstances in which Fascist movements of various types were launched… There is no way to nullify the result of democratic elections except by eliminating the democracy, along with its machinery for following the course chosen by the majority. So that is what the Fascists did. Many highly respectable persons, genuinely horrified at what they considered unjustified attacks on the security of their property and social positions, gave support to the parties which dared oppose the result of the democratic elections. They considered that the voters had made a grievous error. They arrogated to themselves the right to correct it. They were not far-seeing enough to realize that the nullification of the result of an election meant necessarily the nullification of all elections, of the entire system which” guaranteed legal protection for acquired rights.”

Waverley Root concludes: “In France, the 1936 victory of the Popular Front was not followed by open revolt, but the classes who opposed it proceeded to sabotage the attempts by the elected government to put into force the platform which the voters had approved. These groups were easy victims of the Nazis…”

Even prominent neoconservatives like the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, who lobbied heavily against Trump in last year’s election, are aware that the Democratic Party’s current campaign to sabotage Trump’s presidency risks catastrophe by undermining the credibility of the American election process. During the campaign for president, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were targets for delegitimization and by the same group of elites, but in the maelstrom following the election the real target for delegitimization, democracy itself, has been consistently overlooked and the dangers are real and growing.

The interests of the upper classes in America today, the Wall Street hedge fund billionaires and technocratic elites are no different than those of France in the 1930s who were waiting for the moment to seize power once they had succeeded in undermining the democratic process. As it occurred in France and is now occurring in the U.S, the elites have manipulated the political system to destroy itself from within for no one’s benefit but their own. Ironically there is little difference today in the efforts to delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency from those in the late 1930s that opened the door for Fascism and World War II. But the starkest historical similarity of all between now and the run up to World War II may lie in the overtly racist demonization of Russia and the original goals of the Third Reich, played out in the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia in 1941.

According to an unpublished article prepared by the press section of the Nazi General Staff early in the Russian campaign as cited by Waverley Root, the Nazi’s sole aim had never been to wage war in Western Europe – but had always been to rid “Europe of ‘the purulent Bolshevik abscess’ in order to be able to ‘construct the New Order…’” And “once Russia is defeated, the New European Order, the New Asiatic Order and the New World Order will finally be able to establish themselves in a pacified universe, according to the grandiose plans of the greatest man the world has ever known–Adolph Hitler!”

The horror of World War II – which Waverley Root made abundantly clear, was intended solely for Soviet Russia and not Europe – was followed by the prolonged horror of another war against Russia known as the Cold War. The 1940 novelDarkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Zionist-ex-Communist propagandist who’d fled to London,would set the tone for the post-war demonization of the Soviet Union. Employed by the secret propaganda arm of the British Foreign office the (IRD), a dangerously unstable Koestler would become a major influence in the creation of the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). And with the aid of the British/ American intellectual James Burnham, a convert from Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International, Koestler would embrace the rule of America’s imperial hierarchy, urging his fellow anti-Soviet intellectuals to aid the West’s “power elite in its mission to rule.”

Today America faces its own Darkness at Noon moment, but much to the disappointment of the current crop of Arthur Koestlers, putting the blame on Moscow while blood is spilling in the streets of America begs questions that Washington cannot afford to ignore but yet cannot afford to answer.

Race hatred is a powerful influence on American policy today both at home and abroad. Seen in this light, the war against Russia and the current demonization of Vladimir Putin is a race war to finish the job the Nazi’s failed to accomplish in 1941 with their invasion of Russia known as Operation Barbarossa.

Democracy and freedom of expression are under attack. There is blood in the streets. How did it get that way? Where did it come from, what are its sources and what continues to drive it? In this four part series we’ll look at the origin of those sources and unlock connections that when understood should open doors of perception that have been locked shut for far too long.

Liz and Paul say that the Neocons/Neo-liberals are literally dreaming. They quote from Lawrence of Arabia to demonstrate the dangers of dreaming stupidly:Those who dream by night…wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.- Lawrence of Arabia from Seven Pillars of Wisdom

On the other hand, they cite a quote that shows a powerful understanding of dreams, myths and one’s own life: Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same. - Joseph Campbell